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heaps of brick and shattered marble! What glare of fires,
and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence and
famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where
nothing is now heard but the wind, and where the solitary
lizards gambol unmolested in the sun!

The train of Wine-carts going into Rome, each driven
by a shaggy peasant reclining beneath a little gipsy-fash-
ioned canopy of sheepskin, is ended now, and we go toiling
up into a higher country where there are trees. The next
day brings us on the Pontine Marshes, wearily flat and
lonesome, and overgrown with brushwood, and swamped
with water, but with a fine road made across them, shaded
by a long, long, avenue. Here and there, we pass a solitary
guard-house; here and there, a hovel, deserted, and walled
up. Some herdsmen loiter on the banks of the stream be-
side the road, and sometimes a flat-bottomed boat, towed
by a man, comes rippling idly along it. A horseman passes
occasionally, carrying a long gun cross-wise on the saddle
before him, and attended by fierce dogs; but there is noth-
ing else astir save the wind and the shadows, until we come
in sight of Terracina.

How blue and bright the sea, rolling below the win-
dows of the Inn so famous in robber stories! How pic-
turesque the great crags and points of rock overhanging
tomorrow's narrow road, where galley-slaves are working
in the quarries above, and the sentinels who guard them
lounge on the sea shore! All night there is the murmur
of the sea beneath the stars; and, in the morning, just

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